Shakespeare biographies: the good, the Bard and the ugly

James Shapiro's Contested Will concentrates on the lunatic fringe of Shakespeare authorship theories – a fascinating topic, to be sure, if you admire snobbery, philistinism and ignorance.

But as it happens, Shakespeare biography is now (at least) 300 years old, and there have been plenty of bemusing, eccentric or downright surreal contributions to the field, even among those biographers who don't think Shakespeare was the Earl of Oxford. Crackpot theorising, outright fantasising and expressions of superimposed vanity (Shakespeare, c'est moi!) are all part of the fun. Take the following examples, for example: attempts at writing the ultimate writer's life, good, bad, indifferent, ugly, or just plain delusional. Further suggestions/angry objections welcome.

John Aubrey

According to Aubrey's Brief Lives, that fine blend of antiquarian notes and 17th-century table talk, Shakespeare's father was a butcher. When he was a boy, "he exercised his father's trade, but when he killed a calf he would do it in a high style, and make a speech". Shakespeare was a schoolteacher for a while and taught Latin (no doubts there about Shakespeare's linguistic abilities). "His comedies will remain wit as long as the English tongue is understood."

Nicholas Rowe

The business of Shakespeare biography gets going with Rowe, the poet laureate and playwright who (correct me if I'm wrong) gave the English language the word "Lothario". Rowe prefaced his 1709 edition of Shakespeare's Works with a short biography that was reissued last year to mark its 300th anniversary. Marvellously wide of the mark on most matters of fact, it's full of praise for the plays. Rowe sees Shylock in The Merchant of Venice as a serious rather than a buffoonish part, which is how it was acted at the time, and defends Shakespeare against general critical prejudices. The young Shakespeare was a deer-poacher. Getting caught led directly to his move – his escape – into the theatre business.

John Payne Collier

The great 19th-century scholar was also a great forger. Some of his inventions were simply single words added to existing documents; on other occasions, he simply made up evidence and presented it, humbly declining to take credit for the discovery, as material for scholarly consideration. Did a ballad that happened to mention King Priam, "False Cressid" and "loving Troylus" refer to Shakespeare's play Troilus and Cressida? With mock cautiousness, Collier conceded that it could allude to "a different play on the same subject". Another ballad had Marlowe breaking his leg while acting on the stage of the Curtain theatre. Collier later came to repent it all bitterly.

Frank Harris

"Frank Harris is upstairs, thinking about Shakespeare at the top of his voice." Oscar Wilde (who died in 1900) wouldn't have been surprised by The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life-Story (1909), his friend Harris's masterpiece of unfounded assertion and biographical melodrama. For Harris ("Liar, libertine, and blackmailer", as one critic calls him), it was the humble Shakespeare's doomed passion for one of the Queen's Maid of Honour, Mary Fitton, that brought the playwright to "self-knowledge and knowledge of life, and turned him from a light-hearted writer of comedies and histories into the author of the greatest tragedies that have ever been conceived" (shades of Shakespeare in Love there). Plays aren't plays – they're exercises in autobiography – which makes Harris a prime example of the literal-minded tendency derided by James Shapiro in Contested Will.

AL Rowse

Perhaps Rowse, the Oxford historian who wrote several books relating to Shakespeare, is not so remarkable for what he thought as for the attitude that carried him along, brushing aside all objections to his "decoding" of Shakespeare's Sonnets. He told a newspaper in 1963: "I am prepared to stake my reputation as an Elizabethan scholar on the claim that all the problems of the Sonnets save one – the identity of Shakespeare's mistress, the Dark Lady – are susceptible of solution, and that I have solved them". Ten years later, he'd solved the one remaining problem, too: the Dark Lady was the poet Emilia Lanier. "This is she! This is the Lady!" Never mind that it's not even clear that Lanier was a dark lady, let alone the Dark Lady – or indeed, whether or not there was a real Dark Lady at all. My goodness, what if Shakespeare actually made the whole thing up?